Men from MAARRS
"We like to be called Bruce," said the Man from MAARRS. The Men from MAARRS were a race of military cyborgs created and manufactured by the Megakill Armaments, Ammunition, Rockets, Recreation and Soup (MAARRS) consortium of the planet Aurora. The Women from VENIS (Very Enhanced Neural Interplexed Simulacrum) were a similar race of cyborg women designed for infiltration, intelligence-gathering, and assassination. They were created for purposes of both military defense and entertainment (as both pornographer and gladiatorial combat were popular forms of entertainment on the planet Aurora. Physiology Their engineers described them as "bio-engineered, genetically programmed, organic machines." Their physical make-up consisted of both cybernetic components, including a titanium-alloy endo-skeleton and carbon-graphite exo-armor, combined with biological components including muscle, nervous, digestive, and circulatory systems. The biological components are completely artifcial, bearing little molecular commonality with their human counterparts. The skin of the Men from MAARRS was a protein-carbon amalgam resistant to small arms fire. Aside from those anomalies, the Men from MAARRS and the women from VENIS presented as humanoid in appearance. The Men were notably larger, and more thickly muscled. The women had notably slimmer waists and larger breasts. Development and Rebellion on Aurora Auntie Maim, the CEO of the MAARRS Synerplex intended to build an army of these artificial life forms for the purpose of World Domination.However, the first batch of 1,000 soldiers was sabotaged by one of the project engineers, Festus Creed, to subvert Auntie Maim's plans.The soldiers refused to fight for her. She ordered the entire batch destroyed, but the Men from MAARRS fought back and escaped; 200 survivors taking shelter in a spaceyard that was off-limits due to radioactive contamination. Another designer on the Men from MAARRS project, Cherry Forever, defected to the Supah Al-Fareek synerplex and used her knowledge of the program to develop a feminoid artificial life form based on Supah Al-Fareek's Very Enhanced Neural Interplexed Simulacrum -- an artificial intelligence and nervous system developed for Supah Al-Fareek's line of sex robots. Using her own physiology as a template, she developed the Women from VENIS. 75 protoypes were produced. One example of the Women from VENIS, Hellen Earth, was programmed to assassinate Auntie Maim. However, Maim was able to deactivate her assassin program using an embedded deactivation sequence. Hellen Earth escaped, but accessed the high security data core of MAARRS and learned about the Men from MAARRS and deduced their hiding place in the abandoned spaceyards. Using an old spacecraft that had been built but never launched from the spaceyards, the Men from MAARRS and the Women from VENIS left Aurora and retreated to the planet Ecco 1, whose human population had been turned to salt during the Tarmigan Apocalypse. [Worlds Apart Book 05 – Aurora ] Development of Culture on Ecco 1 Despite not being equipped with reproductive organs, the Women from VENIS retained full operational schematics and were able to set up a production facility on the planet Ecco 1. Within a generation, the planet had a population of millions, albeit with very little physical variations among the inhabitants. Resentful of their treatment on Aurora, the artificial organisms of Ecco 1 came to believe that vengeance was in order. They built a small fleet of warships and attacked their former home. Devastating the MAARRS and Supah Al-Fareek metroplexes. By this time, the Synerplexes had collapsed entirely. The cities they bombed were, mostly, nearly empty of inhabitants. Nevertheless, Aurora’s new government was angered by the attack, and began building defenses against further Ecco 1 attacks. The cyborgs continued their campaign of random attacks and both sides rejected the New Commonwealth’s offer of brokering a peace deal. Role in the Second Aurelian War The Ecco 1 cyborgs allied with the Aurelians during the Second Aurelian War, and used this alliance to stage repeated attacks against the planet Aurora. They also used their fleet of ships to move people and cargo between Aurelian-occupied worlds, and engaged in guerilla attacks against Allied ships, bases, and facilities and were especially active during the Bountiful campaign. Their high resistance to radiation and extremes of heat and cold made them well-suited for dangerous missions. They also became accomplished space pirates, and seized a number of commercial freighters and starliners during the war; killing their crews and seizing the ships for use as armed privateers. In 7307, a force of Cyborgs from Ecco 1 attempted to use a captured merchant ship in a kamikaze attack against the Bountifullian capital of Zarahemla, but the ship broke apart in the atmosphere. Areas nearby Zarahemla suffered the impact of flaming ship debris, however. Fearsome counter-attacks from the planets Sapphire, Wolf’s Head, and Guelph led the Cyborgs to cease seizing commercial ships. The Ecco 1 cyborgs sought to bring the android population of Medea into the war on the Aurelian side. When the Medean androids refused, the Ecco 1 cyborgs attacked their planet. The Medean androids had no capacity for self-defense and were nearly destroyed until a renegade cyberneticist added enhancements to their self-preservation protocol. The Medeans developed battle-droids and were able to drive off the Ecco 1 onslaught. The Ecco1 cyborgs created a virus that would override the Medeans’ root command that prevented them from killing humans. A substantial number of the population was infected by the virus, and some left Medea to fight alongside the Ecco1 cyborgs before a countermeasure was developed and applied to the common programming baseline. After the Second Aurelian War After the Aurelian defeat, the Cyborgs maintained their hostility toward humanity. They moved to establish new settlements on the radiation-scarred planets Bernal and Chevy Vega. Their penchant for mayhem and hostility toward human life made them an ongoing security threat for centuries. Acts of piracy and hijacking against interstellar ships, as well as terrorist attacks (primarily against Aurora, but also against other New Commonwealth worlds) continued; requiring security escorts for ships transiting through known Cyborg Operational Areas. The Free Worlds Alliance StarForce developed a plan to completely annihilate the planet Ecco 1 to eliminate the entire population, but it was determined to be counterproductive since so many of the cyborgs lived off-world. Category:Alien Races Category:Technology